I got tired of tracking every ad campaign I see
Scrolling through ads feels like a second job
I was sitting on the subway the other day, somewhere between Gangnam and Sadang, and I realized I had been staring at the same style of influencer-led advertisement for three stops. It was that skincare brand, Bring Green, featuring Mun Sang-hoon. I’ve seen his face on bus wraps, subway screen doors, and then again as an Instagram sponsored post during my lunch break. It is strange how they push these campaigns everywhere at once. It’s effective, sure, but it feels exhausting. I sometimes wonder if the average person even notices the difference between an organic post and a well-funded ad anymore. I certainly stopped trying to distinguish them a while ago.
The constant cycle of celebrity endorsements
Everywhere I look, it’s the same pattern. SK Magic has Byeon Woo-seok for their ice water purifier, and honestly, the video they put out—the one with the ‘I don’t melt easily’ tagline—kept popping up in my feed for weeks. It hit 12 million views, which is massive, but I remember thinking how weird it was to see a celebrity I just watched in a TV drama suddenly talking about ice cubes. It feels like every company is just fighting a ‘star war’ right now. Whether it’s SK Magic with Byeon Woo-seok or Cuckoo bringing in Lee Jun-ho, the strategy feels identical. You buy the person, you slap them on a product, and you hope the demographic shift happens automatically. I don’t know if it actually makes people want the water purifier more, or if we just recognize the face and feel a strange, misplaced sense of familiarity.
Why these giveaways feel so crowded
Then there are the experiential marketing stunts, like Lotte Wellfood doing that ‘Seol-le-im Run’ thing with Kian84. They want you to buy the product, take a photo, and verify it on their Instagram. I tried participating in a similar event once for a free ticket, and the hoops you have to jump through—checking the post, keeping the receipt, dealing with the tagging rules—it just feels like unpaid labor. I spent maybe 30 minutes trying to figure out if I had the right hashtag, and for what? A chance to win something that probably wasn’t worth the effort. Access details like ‘verify your purchase’ are becoming the standard entry fee for brand engagement, and I am starting to find it more annoying than rewarding.
The weird scams lurking in the feed
What really irritates me now is how blurred the lines are between actual brand ads and these aggressive, slightly suspicious investment ads. I was scrolling through YouTube Shorts late at night, and an ad popped up claiming that some 850 won ‘penny stock’ was going to explode because of AI or semiconductor trends. It looks exactly like the slick, professional ads that legitimate brands use. It’s wild how they mimic the aesthetic of real digital marketing. If I weren’t paying attention, it would be so easy to click. It makes me want to put my phone down and just look at the floor of the subway car instead of the screen.
Nothing feels permanent anymore
I am still not sure if any of this is actually working on me, or if I am just a passive consumer of visual noise. When I see things like Ocean World offering free entry based on follower counts—200,000 subscribers, which is a massive number—it makes the whole ecosystem feel so transactional. Everything has a price, a required action, or a celebrity face attached to it. I keep seeing these ads, and even though I ignore most of them, they take up so much mental space. I don’t know if there is a better way for companies to do this, but I do know that after a few hours of scrolling, I feel like I need to clear my head of all the slogans and hashtags.
